Here's the story of one of the more
interesting Ibanez guitars from the
'70's, as told by Jeff Hasselberger
himself.

"The KISS boys were always good for a
challenge or two. Rather than get
wrapped up in the minutiae of fret
crown shapes and potentiometer tapers,
Paul Stanley knew what the important
issues were - like should the pickguard
be chrome plated or polished stainless.

"Paul's legendary Mirror Ball Iceman is
a perfect example of how to push the
envelope of guitar technology. It started
with a phone call from Paul about his idea
to have a guitar that resembled a
shattered mirror. His exact words, if I
recall, were, "I want it to look like
somebody hit a mirrored guitar with a
hammer right on the pickups."

"It sounded easy enough. I got some 1/8"
mirror, cut it into the shape of an Iceman and
smacked it in the pickup area with a ham-
mer. What I ended up with was about
10,000 bits of mirror dust where the hammer
hit and three other pieces. This
was obviously not going to work.
"I was going to have to cut each
piece to look like it was shattered.
I went out and got a lot more 1/8 mirror
and a handful of glass cutters.

Starting with one piece of mirror cut
into the shape of Paul's guitar, I thought of
drawing a plan and transferring it to the
mirror. In the end, I decided to wing it and
started to cut out pieces that I thought looked
cool. It took a couple of days to do this and
as I went around the guitar, I started to get the
hang of it. When it was finished, I was glad
to still have five fingers on each hand."
"As it turned out, cutting the mirror was
the easy part. While I was doing the mirror,
my trusty partner in crime at Ibanez, Jim
Heffner. was routing a quarter-inch out of
the top of one of Paul's guitars. That's right,
the mirrors were a retrofit. Jim left the
abalonoid binding around the top and the
plan was to slap some epoxy in there and set
the mirrors into it.

"We routed out twice the thickness of the mirror so we could set each piece at a slightly different angle, Paul's stage concept was to hit the guitar with a Super Trooper spot light and have rays of light shooting out from the guitar at all angles like a mirror ball. We figured a 5 to 15 degree difference between adjoining pieces would do it."

"I wrapped dowels with masking tape to
keep all the holes from clogging with epoxy
and went to town. Since the Iceman has a
slightly arched top, I had to re-cut some of
the mirror to better fit the curve of the top.
This part was tedious and trying to keep
ahead of the epoxy cure was not always
successful, but all the pieces seemed to fit
pretty well".

''Late that night, with all the mirrors in place, Jim and I took the axe outside and
gave it a test run in the headlights of my pickup truck. Yup, it worked. Shards of
light were shooting off every which way. The only problem was that because the
mirrors were set at angles to each other, the joints were razor sharp. You could make
mountains of tasty cole slaw with this Veg-O-Caster."

"I was prepared to deal with this by flowing a clear polyurethane finish over the mirrors so the surface would be nice and smooth and safe. Next morning, I mixed up the
polyurethane and poured it on. I went about my business for a few hours and when I went
back to the shop to check it, my stomach knotted. It was drying cloudy and ruining the
whole mirror effect. Shit! Now what?"

"Before it got rock hard, I took a chisel and began to scrape the finish off. Fortunately, glass doesn't hold finish very well, and by dinner time I had removed nearly all the finish. The finish wouldn't come out from between the pieces, but that proved to be the solution to the problem."

" I filled all the joints with polyurethane, but that still left sharp edges. I ended up using a small sanding wheel on a Dremel tool to grind each mirror joint smooth, back filling with polyurethane as needed. This took forever, but it did the trick."

"All that remained was to get some glass drill bits and to mount all the pickups and hardware. Paul was anxious to give it a go and damage some corneas as well as some eardrums. When I finally saw it on stage with about a million candlepower blasting into it, the vision was pretty impressive."

"Of all the custom guitars we did this one sticks in my mind mainly because I found some old photos to jog my failing memory. The fact that it required a tremendous amount of effort to make and contributed virtually nothing to the universe of guitar technology will endear it to me forever."